22. Idrilia #2
That was Cardilia in a single sentence. She loved me, fully and without reservation, but she'd never once understood me.
She'd been groomed since childhood to be the next Queen of Tarina, and she'd taken to it the way I'd taken to botany, until duty and personality had fused into a single refined entity.
She made our parents proud, and I was happy for her and for them, but I couldn't do what she did.
"I don't care," I said. "Let them whisper. People do that no matter what. I could be perfect and they'll still find something."
"Let her be, Cardilia." Lotian came to my rescue. "She climbed a mountain. The calluses at least make for a good story."
"You're not being helpful," Cardilia said.
"I never am. It's my one consistency." He grinned at me in the mirror and winked.
I felt the knot in my chest ease a fraction.
Lotian always had my back. He was second in line and perfectly content to stay there, and that contentment had made him the only member of my family who didn't care that I didn't toe the line.
In fact, he was proud of me for doing my own thing, and I loved him for it.
I also loved him for needling our mother on my behalf so I didn't have to.
She would never admit it, but he was her favorite and could get away with stuff that Cardilia and I never could.
Maybe it was because he was a man and our mother didn't have the same expectations of him.
She wanted her daughters to be a reflection of her, majestic and proper, while Lotian was a mirror image of our easygoing father.
Our mother rose from the chaise, crossed to the dais, and the seamstress melted back, the way everyone melted back from Queen Margada of Tarina.
She studied me in the half-pinned gown, and I watched her decide which battle was worth fighting and which she'd let pass.
Her nerves were close to the surface today.
I could see it in the set of her jaw and the way her gaze kept flicking to the bolts of fabric as if their exact shade might be the thing that saved or doomed us.
"It will need taking in at the waist," she said to the seamstress. "And the silver thread at the collar, not the trim. The trim reads cheap from a distance."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Everything reads from a distance this year." My mother's hand settled on my shoulder. "I need all of you flawless. This is not an ordinary ball."
"It's the same ball it is every year," I said. "Old men and women congratulating each other on their cleverness while the rest of us starve in our finery because the speeches take forever and the food is served late."
"Not this year." Something in her voice made me look at her properly.
"There are matters in motion within the Federation that you are fortunate not to carry.
Alliances are shifting. What happens in Vedona this season could shape the next decade.
" Her fingers tightened, then released. "I need Tarina to look like it belongs in the conversation. "
"Then have Cardilia dazzle them," I said. "She's the heir, she's beautiful, and she knows how to play the part and actually enjoys it. I can stand at the back in sky-blue and silver and let the lighting do the work."
"All my children represent Tarina," my mother said, in the tone that ended discussions. "Including the one who would rather be a botanist."
"Pharmacologist," I corrected. "Botany is only the half of it."
My mother chose not to hear me and turned to inspect Cardilia's half-finished dress that was draped over a mannequin.
Tarina was a small, unimportant province whose only currency was the border it shared with Elucia.
I was its third child, plain by my own honest accounting, with calluses on my hands and a tan my mother despaired of, and no one in Vedona had ever spared me a second glance.
Whatever was shifting in the Federation and making my mother's hands restless and the silver thread suddenly a matter of state, it would flow around me like it always had.
Later that evening, Ursa insisted on another foot soak.
"I'm glad the queen hasn't seen these." She had my left foot in her lap and an exaggerated, desperate expression on her face.
"They're not so bad. Besides, worst case I can wear slippers instead of sandals and no one will see my feet."
"All the other queens, princesses, and ladies will be wearing strappy, high-heeled sandals.
" She worked the pumice along my heel with more force than necessary.
"You're going to put these feet into a pair of silver sandals and stand in them for five hours, and everyone in Vedona is going to look down and see a goat herder's feet instead of a princess's. "
I was sitting on the edge of my bed in my nightdress with my foot in a basin of oiled and salted water gone tepid, my hair loose around my shoulders, and my face clean of makeup. Ursa could say whatever she wanted and it wasn't going to get a rise out of me.
"I could just not go," I said. "Plead illness. Climbing fatigue. A relapse of mountain lung."
"You could not." She dried my foot and reached for the salve.
"Your mother would carry you to Vedona in a sedan chair before she let you skip it this year.
Hold still." The salve was cold and smelled of beeswax and aromatic herbs.
"She's right about one thing, by the way. This isn't an ordinary year."
"Did you find more information about the ball?"
"More of the same." She worked the salve into the cracked skin. "Catonia's court is spending a fortune, hiring the best entertainers from all seventeen provinces, and Chef Verdigio is in charge of the banquet. I bet they have a big announcement to make."
"Like what?"
"That's the part that's still noise." She set my foot down and lifted the other one, inspecting it with the same dismay. "The thread that keeps coming back is the heir. The Catonian crown prince. Word is he'll stand up at the ball and announce his bride."
I leaned back on my hands. "I pity the poor princess, whoever she is.
Married off in front of the whole Federation to seal someone's alliance.
" I thought of my mother's hands, restless on the bolts of fabric, and dismissed the connection before it could form.
"Poor girl. At least it's nothing to do with us.
Catonia doesn't look at Tarina, and the crown prince certainly isn't looking at us.
Cardilia's the heir, so she's off the table.
He'll want a second daughter from somewhere that matters. "
Ursa arched a brow. "Or a third child?"
I snorted. "Right. Even if I were a great beauty, which I'm not, Catonia would gain nothing from an alliance with Tarina, and who gains what from whom is all that matters."